The Nationals Election

In Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1859, some government clerks, “fascinated by newspaper accounts of the Game of Base Ball in other cities,” started playing with bats and balls just behind what was then referred to as the President’s Mansion, as the sportswriter Shirley Povich recounted in a history published about a century later. One of the early teams was called the National Club, later the Nationals.

Entering Wednesday’s games, with just over a tenth of the 2012 season played, a team called the Washington Nationals stands in first place of the National League East division of Major League Baseball, with a record of 13-4. This is a novel and fragile situation. The last time a team in Washington won the World Series was in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge attended the ballpark to watch the Senators defeat the New York Giants in the twelfth inning of the seventh game. This, then, is the moment to ask whether the Nationals’ success could affect the 2012 Presidential election—quickly, before the Nats revert to form and the question becomes moot.

The path between 1859 and 2012 has not been straight. It took a while for baseball to organize itself as a professional sport, and when it did, a team called the Washington Senators (but sometimes referred to as the Nationals or the Nats) joined the American League. By the dawn of what would be known, for other reasons, as the American Century, the Senators were so bad that they had become a popular vaudeville gag: “The folks in the theater, the man in the street and the children in school knew that Washington was first in peace, first in war, and last in the American League,” Povich wrote.

A Renaissance began when Walter Johnson came to town—several pennants were captured, in addition to the ’24 Series. The political exploitation of D.C. baseball by incumbent Presidents also flourished. William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower all successively mugged for photographers and tossed out first pitches to the Senators on Opening Day, even if, after 1933, the home team usually stank.

In 1960, an era of betrayal, open racism, and disillusionment arrived. Clark Griffith, the son of a successful Nats owner and manager, Calvin Griffith, became concerned that his Washington audience was “getting to be all colored,” as he put it, so he moved the Senators to Minnesota to create the Twins. “You only have fifteen thousand blacks here,” he explained later to Minnesota businessmen. Griffith said he appreciated his new fan base of “good hardworking white people.”

President Eisenhower strong-armed baseball into creating an expansion team, also named the Senators, to compensate for Griffith’s departure. Those Senators floundered, and were bought by a debt-burdened failed Minnesota politician named Bob Short. Short schemed to move his team to a more lucrative market and sell them at profit. He eyed Dallas, Texas. On Short’s last night in town, in 1971, drunken fans carrying signs calling for the owner’s demise tore up stadium seats and the field.

“This isn’t exactly a pleasure,” the team’s slugger, Frank Howard, remarked after the last game. “Nobody’s going to buy a horseshit product, and that’s what we’ve been.”

Short created the Texas Rangers, sold them as planned, and thereby created the conditions under which a failed oil wildcatter named George W. Bush could, as the Rangers’ managing partner, redeem himself as a moderately competent baseball executive. This set the stage for Bush to become governor of Texas and, later, move into the White House. It is a little remarked upon fact that the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis are the responsibility of the late Bob Short.

For a long time after the second Senators left town, there was no Major League Baseball in Washington, and it seemed as if there never would be. The city and the suburbs constituted a large market, but the Baltimore Orioles played nearby, and they built an appealing stadium, Camden Yards.

In 2005, following an unlikely and faintly miraculous series of events, Major League Baseball agreed to move the insolvent Montreal Expos to Washington; they became the Nationals. A shiny new ballpark beside the Anacostia River opened a few years later. The ring of fame honoring the club’s history on a strip of stadium concrete has to be one of the most confused and confusing in sports—a bizarre mix of Expos, Senators, and random names. As invented traditions go, the Nationals offer an unusually unconvincing story.

However, baseball had recruited the Lerners, a local family of real-estate moguls with deep pockets and established ties to the city, to buy the team. The theory is that they won’t decamp if hard times return. The Lerners have proved to be cautious and not dazzlingly adept in their baseball decision-making, but lately their patience and devotion to building through young pitching has delivered. The Nationals have an awesome starting rotation of power arms, and, at 2.21, the lowest earned-run average in the game by almost half a run.

All very interesting, but as I write this, the Stephen Strasburg bobblehead doll above my desk is shaking his head to indicate that the Nationals’ hot start might not matter much outside the Beltway. But Stephen, you are ignoring the calendar.

The next president of the United States will be elected on November 6, 2012. The most important nationally televised sporting event preceding the vote will be the World Series, likely during the last week of October. And what if the World Series includes the Nationals? What if there are games in Washington? What if, as in 1924, there is a thrilling game seven, and it goes into extra innings, and the President of the United States is in attendance, smiling confidently during television cutaway shots?

Consider this the start of the Washington Nationals subset of the general election contest. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each have considerable ground to cover.

The former is a Chicago White Sox fan—a credible sports head, but one who has neglected the Nationals unduly. (This year, the team recruited the actor and former Army soldier J. R. Martinez to toss out the first pitch for the home opener. The Nationals’ Opening Day game was on the road in Chicago, where Bill Murray did the honors.) Romney recently conducted an interview with ABC Television in Fenway Park, and declares himself a Red Sox man. He is not a baseball obsessive, however; he was unaware that the Tampa Bay Rays, a division rival of the Red Sox, play under a dome.

Neither candidate has yet admitted that Washington, D.C., is not a terrible place to live in a mansion or that its live-armed squad of 2012 deserves attention. This might be the time to show initiative—turn up at the ballpark while optimism is in the air, commune with some players, toss it around. By October, those in the stands may well be calling, by habit, for the heads of hypocrites, betrayers, and latecomers.

President Woodrow Wilson throws out the first pitch at a season-opening baseball game, in 1916. Photograph: Corbis.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.